Topline
TikTok superstar Khaby Lame’s nearly billion-dollar deal with Rich Sparkle Holdings sent the value of that company and its newest shareholder soaring—hitting $16.3 billion on January 15, with Lame’s stake worth $6.6 billion—but has some experts raising red flags after it crashed within days.
By Martina Di Licosa, Forbes Staff
Key Facts
Hong Kong-based Rich Sparkle Holdings (ANPA) reported to the SEC on Jan. 9 it was acquiring Lame’s Step Distinctive Limited, and announced the $975 million all-stock transaction closed in a press release two days later.
Rich Sparkle boasted the deal would offer a “structured, exclusive, full-chain, platform-style commercialization system” around Lame, who would be a “controlling shareholder,” and whose likeness would be replicated by an “AI Digital Twin.”
Soon after, Rich Sparkle’s stock skyrocketed over 650%, reaching a high of $180.64 per share on January 15, with Lame’s stake worth $6.6 billion (based on his 49% ownership of Step Distinctive, which gave him a 41% stake in its buyer), though due to limited disclosure requirements for foreign entities, it’s unclear whether Lame sold any shares.
Rich Sparkle had first listed on Nasdaq six months prior in July, in a small offering of 1.25 million shares priced at $4 each with an implied enterprise value of about $50 million, according to SEC filings, and it disclosed 2024 revenue of under $6 million from “designing and printing high quality financial materials.”
Rich Sparkle’s sudden shift in focus, explosive stock growth and quick crash—it’s dropped as low as $41, 77% from its peak—has some critics raising “red flags.”
Lame, who has over 160 million followers on TikTok and 78 million on Instagram, only commented on the deal 11 days after Rich Sparkle announced it had closed, saying “Congratulations to the team at ANPA very excited to be a shareholder and looking forward to doing great things!” (Lame and Rich Sparkle have not responded to Forbes’ requests for comment).
Based on Rich Sparkle’s most recent stock price, Lame’s net worth appears to be $3 billion, but given its tiny float of less than 5%, Forbes would value it based on its financials and not its stock price, meaning he’s nowhere close to being a billionaire.
“It's very suspect,” says Brenda Hamilton, a securities attorney at Hamilton & Associates Law, about Rich Sparkle’s IPO. “They filed a prospectus that stated they were going to pursue a certain business and within less than a year,” Hamilton says, “they had entered into a completely different business and they issued large amounts of shares that resulted in a change of control.” She describes Rich Sparkle’s stock fluctuations as “a red flag,” explaining that foreign issuers make due diligence “very difficult for investors" and that the SEC has recently set up a task force to address the issue. Though Lame said on Instagram he was "excited to be a shareholder," it's unclear if the deal has closed. Rich Sparkle Holdings did not file a form with the SEC confirming the closing after announcing it in its January 11 press release. This suggests they may have missed the legal deadline to file, or it may not have gone through yet, explains Hamilton. “It leaves a lot of questions to be answered,” adds securities attorney Ron Geffner, partner at Sadis & Goldberg LLP and former SEC investigator, “It appears that the valuation is predominantly based on Khaby Lame’s following on TikTok.” Laura Posner, a partner in the securities litigation & investor protection division at Cohen Milstein, agrees: “I’ve only seen that kind of [stock] chart in a pump and dump scheme.”
“This looks completely like a Chinese stock promotion,” says Jim Chanos, founder and managing partner at Chanos & Company, known for prescient short analysis, including Enron’s collapse. “The whole thing just seems nuts.” A Chinese stock promotion refers to a known pattern in which a little-known public firm with ties to China sees its stock skyrocket, often through small trading volumes, as a result of heavy hype despite limited revenue. This can cause the stock to show a multi-billion-dollar market cap on paper, even though insiders couldn’t realistically sell at those prices. ANPA was trading at a volume of a little over 120,000 shares as of Friday, based on data from Yahoo Finance. The risk posed by this phenomenon is that early stockholders can benefit from the price spike while later buyers are left exposed when prices fall. Well-known examples include Magic Empire (MEGL), Addentax (ATXG), and AMTD Digital (HKD), the latter of whose IPO was underwritten by the same firm, Eddid Securities, as Rich Sparkle’s.
Lame’s Step Distinctive Limited was incorporated in the British Virgin Islands on July 12, 2025, right around the same time as when Rich Sparkle went public. Rich Sparkle Holdings’ IPO was underwritten by Eddid Securities USA, which sponsored at least two other listings that surged rapidly before collapsing: iOThree Limited and AMTD Digital Inc., which saw its stock surge from $7.80 to $1,100 “for no apparent reason,” as the BBC pointed out. It’s the American subsidiary of Eddid International Financial Holdings, which is based in Hong Kong and was registered in the U.S in 2019. Eddid’s Compliance Chief, Jimmy Sung, has a long history working for little-known brokerage firms, including two that were expelled by the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) for failure to pay fines tied to regulatory action: Sonic Technologies LLC and Thomas James Associates LLC, which was cited for violations eight different times. On December 15, 2025, Rich Sparkle’s independent auditor, Wei, Wei & Co., resigned “effective immediately,” though both parties stated there were no disagreements. Pink13 Group Inc, the second-largest shareholder in Lame’s Step Distinctive, was registered in Delaware in June 2025, one month before Rich Sparkle’s IPO, and its ownership is unknown. (Pink13 has not responded to Forbes’ request for comment).
$16.3 billion. That was Rich Sparkle Holdings’ (ANPA) total market capitalization at its peak, based on 90.5 million shares outstanding and its highest price on January 15, a milestone reached just six months after its IPO at $4 per share with an implied enterprise value of $50 million. As of Friday at market close, it was worth about $7.5 billion.
Lame was born in Senegal but moved to Italy as an infant with his family. He began posting on TikTok during the COVID pandemic in 2020 after being laid off from his job. His page took off with remarkable speed, and by August 2021, after just about 17 months of activity, he hit 100 million followers. Lame’s most popular videos have over 300 million views each. He is No. 10 on the 2025 Forbes list of Top Creators with estimated annual earnings of $20 million as a “mime of memes” and “the most followed human on TikTok.” In an interview with Forbes, he said, “You should not be in a rush to make money,” advising fans to “Start by making the content you like.”
